Sequel looks pretty interesting. I've really fallen out of love with ActiveRecord ... mostly because it really only simplifies the most basic scenarios and as an abstraction it's so very "leaky" as Joel would say. I've begun work on an idea for an ORM that just simplifies the most tedious parts of writing SQL but requires no boilerplate classes and is light and speedy https://github.com/iaindooley/PluSQL (but it currently only supports MySql because it requires buffered query sets)